Welcome to Litsy!

Each book in this series is better than the last,I can't wait to finish all.Read No.3 in Rougon-Macquart,so nuanced and intelligent,and so continually relevant.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7578825197

#TLT #ThreeListThursday

Thank you for the tag @dabbe 😊 I‘ve picked for my three, some Zola titles I‘ve not yet read. I will nominate all three for next year‘s #HashtagBrigade selections. 🤞 I know that Zola super fan @sisilia will support this! 😂

I‘ve rated it a so-so but that‘s probably more a reflection of how long it took me to listen to it (such a short audio too!) as it has actually lingered in my mind. It‘s a classic for a reason and can see how other authors likely took inspiration from its plot/characters. It was slightly repetitive and the characters had no redeeming features at all but I‘m glad to have read it - just wouldn‘t make my favourites list.

Today‘s thrift store finds ! A reissue series from the 1990s . I have several, always great to add to the set ! $1.50 both .Love these covers

Now @Leoslittlebooklife & I are 1/2 through the 20 vol Rougon-Macquart series. This was a marked departure in tone from the previous books. A previous title does it more justice- Restless House. Like in The Assommoir, an apartment building features heavily in the story but this time it‘s a petit bourgeois building vs the squalor of a tenement. While madcapped, lusty and frenetic, the last 4th of the book hammers home the hypocrisy beautifully.

I finally made it to Pere Lachaise today, and Proust was my #1 dead person I had to visit. The map I found online turned out to be wildly unspecific (right quadrant, wrong position for EVERYONE), but I ran into a nice lady who offered me help and steered me right to him.

Alas, I never did find Sarah Bernhardt, but I also said hi to Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. The latter is so rowdy they‘ve got metal event barriers around him.

We are nothing but perpetual animals. What‘s the use of these huge fragile enthusiasms, these dried-out leaps of joy? We know nothing but dead stars; we look at faces; and we sigh with pleasure. Our eyes turn aimlessly, hopelessly. There‘s nothing now but these cafés where we meet to drink these cold beverages, these mixed drinks, and the tables are stickier than these sidewalks where our dead shadows from the day before have fallen.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

#findingjoy
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